World War II Tourism in France Bertram M

Chapter World War II Tourism in France Bertram M. Gordon Emotions and Tourism: World War II France This chapter explores the emotions, passions and movement that characterize World War II-related tourism in France, both during the war and in the occasionally contentious development of war-related tourist sites and what are often called lieux de mémoire [sites of memory] thereafter. The reaction, in the Daily Mail, a British tabloid newspaper, and elsewhere, to Queen Elizabeth’s non-invitation to the 65th D-Day anniversary events in Normandy in June 2009 speaks eloquently to the emotions aroused by wartime tourism (Hickley and English 2009; Burns 2009; Delasalle-Stolper 2009). Tourism is sometimes considered a relatively new phenomenon, with some dating it to the English aristocratic Grand Tour of the sixteenth century and later, but its history goes back far earlier. Evidence for ancient tourism includes the graffiti dating to the middle of the second millennium B.C. found on walls in tombs in Sakkharah, Ghizeh, and Abusir in Egypt. Herodotus, who in Lionel Casson’s words, ‘spent the better part of his life as a tourist,’ described large swaths of the Persian Empire and was, according to Casson, the world’s first travel writer (Casson 1994: 32 and 96). Based on the ancient notion of curiositas, Petrarch wrote, ‘I know that in men’s minds resides an innate longing to see new places.’ (Thubron 1999: 12). Maurice Dupuy considers tourism, ‘from pre-history to our days,’ as based on ‘a desire to know’ and ‘to discover.’ (Dupuy 1994: 18). Emphasizing that ‘far from being born a tourist, man became one,’ Pascal Cuvelier argues that tourism began with the Roman otium, a cultured retreat for the optimates (Cuvelier 1998: 19-20). More recently, Mike Robinson, a British specialist in tourism studies research wrote: ‘If one strips away much of the hardware of tourism and travel we find that the human imagination is at its core.’ (Robinson 2005: xix). As a cultural expression, the tourist ‘gaze,’ a term popularized in 1990 by John Urry, has taken on the signification of the ways in which people encounter, assimilate, and understand ideas, 1 material objects, and other people as they move around the world, observing and studying (Urry 2000: 1-2; Crawshaw and Urry, 1997: 176). Too often, however, the history of tourism in the twentieth century is depicted as stopping in 1939 only to resume again after 1945. Despite the extensive literature on cultural tourism and on warfare and its history, there has been relatively little study of the inter-relationships between the two. Anthologies of studies of specific times and places in tourism history include works edited by John K. Walton, Gilles Bertrand, and the collection edited by Hermann Bausinger, Klaus Beyrer, and Gottfried Korff, to name only a few (Walton 2005; Bertrand 2004; and Bausinger, et. al. 1991). More broadly themed historical studies of the development of tourism include studies by Jean-Didier Urbain, the work by Maurice Dupuy cited above, Catherine Bertho Lavenir, Maxine Feiffer, and Cindy Aron (Urbain 1993; Dupuy 1994: 18; Lavenir 1999; Feiffer 1986; and Cindy Aron 1999). In Germany, Hasso Spode's, ‘Zur Geschichte der Tourismusgeschichte,’ includes a picture of bathers at the Baltic Sea in 1941, ‘in the middle of the war,’ (Spode 2009: 20) but these and other general works on tourism history rarely address its relationship to war. Occasional linkages may be found in a study of urban tourism by Marc Chesnel (Chesnel 2009: 8) and in a presentation by Josette Mesplier-Pinet, who, in addressing a conference entitled ‘Tourisme Culture Patrimoine’ [Tourism, Culture, Heritage] in 2004, noted that cultural tourism, formerly concentrated on the beaux-arts, had become increasingly less ‘elitist’ and was opening more to "new themes" that included military heritage [patrimoine militaire] (Mesplier-Pinet 2009: 12-13). Magazines for enthusiasts, such as After the Battle, published in Britain, are devoted to the retrospective description of battlefield sites. The Dutch website WW2Museums.com, an initiative of STIWOT (Stichting Informatie Wereldoorlog Twee [World War II Information Foundation]), with listings of battlefields and other war monuments throughout Europe, states: ‘WW2Museums.com is the place to plan your own battlefield tour along WW2 museums, monuments, cemeteries and other sights of interest in and outside Europe. Through WW2Museums.com you will be introduced to WW2 sights [sic] of interest that still can be visited today!’ (STIWOT 2010). In many ways, tourism was attenuated during the war but it continued, even if altered in significant ways, and planning for postwar tourism continued as well. One of the pillars of postwar tourism became the sites and circuits linked to the memory of the battles, the concentration camps, the Resistance and the collaboration in France. Postwar tourism in memory became big business and people in the tourism industry recognized it, contributing to making France one of the largest receivers of tourists in the world. Wartime and war-related, tourism, sometimes known as ‘battlefield tourism,’ is now occasionally referenced as ‘thanatourism,’ or ‘dark tourism,’ linked to death, atrocity, or disaster, with visits to battlefields, cemeteries, and memorials, notably the Holocaust (Seaton and Lennon 2004: 63-64). The economic exploitation of three sites of memory connected to World War II in France is addressed by Henning Meyer (Meyer 2006: 529), whereas Wiebke Kolbe notes in her study of postwar German battlefield tourism that distinctions among pilgrimages, battlefield tourism, and tourism in general are difficult if not impossible to draw as reactions of visitors to lieux de mémoire vary. The same visitor to a battlefield or war cemetery might also visit other sites (Kolbe 2009: 47). As a field, World War II tourism study is hardly new but its publishing history and many of the related details still need to be elaborated. My own earlier efforts linking war and tourism include studies of the Germans in occupied France during World War II as well as wartime sites in their role as tourism attractions in the postwar period (Gordon 1996; Gordon 1998; and Gordon 2001). This essay points to some of the emotion generated by World War II tourism and makes a hypothetical foray into the assessment of its significance in the larger tourism context using France as a case study. France is an important case in examining the connections between tourism and war especially in regard to World War II for three significant reasons: first, France's role as the current world leader in tourist visits; secondly, the development of the field of cultural memory following the work of French scholars such as Maurice Halbwachs and more recently Pierre Nora; and thirdly, the production of an extensive historical literature relating to the war and its interpretations in France since 1945. People often think of World War II tourism in France as visits to the Moulin Rouge and Maxim’s restaurant in Paris, where German occupation soldiers spent leisure time; or the grand hotels in the Alps and beach resorts near Nice, many of which remained open during the war years. Just as a larger view of curiosity in motion is needed to analyze generic tourism, a more extensive view of World War II tourism is necessary to understand its history in France during the war and in the more than sixty years since. This essay re-examines World War II tourism in France by focusing first on the most significant sites of tourist curiosity, namely the Atlantic Wall and subsequent Normandy battlefield sites, before turning briefly to tourism during the 1940-1944 German occupation in France, and lastly to the post-1944 expansion of tourist sites that, in addition to the Normandy beaches, became lieux de mémoire. Tourist Gazes during and after the War: Normandy and the Maginot Line In sheer numbers, tourist gazes inevitably followed the major military sequences of the war with attention drawn to the Battle of Britain, the Great Patriotic War in Eastern Europe, the Atlantic and Pacific Theaters, and, D-Day. What focused the tourist gaze during the war in France was surely newsreel films of General Erwin Rommel on tour along the Atlantic Wall coastal defenses, aerial reconnaissance photographs taken by all sides during the war –-arguably among the most photographed sites--, the gawkers on the streets as German, and later Allied, tanks rolled by, and the theaters, movie houses, cafés, and hotels, the romantic sites for French as well as foreign visitors. To this list should be added historic sites that became lieux de mémoire after the war. How many aerial photographs and gazes were directed during the war toward the Atlantic Wall, or how many in France watched newsreels of General Rommel touring the fortifications will never be known. Although one might hesitate to call Rommel a tourist in the sense of a participant in a Cook's tour, Scott McCabe in an essay on the concept of the tourist notes that the American Heritage dictionary offers as one of its definitions: ‘a brief trip through a place, as a building or a site, in order to view or inspect it: The visiting prime minister was given a tour of the chemical plant.’ (McCabe 2009: 31). Tourist curiosity is invariably involved in military campaigns and the interest in the coast can only have been intense as Allies, Germans, military and civilians, looked toward the Atlantic Wall in anticipation of the outcome of the war with intense aerial photography focused on it (Desquesnes 2009B: 74-75). As early as October 1940, the German high command expressed concern about a possible English landing on the French coast and called for continual vigilance there (Rundstedt 1940).

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